Especially for families travelling with small children and for persons accompanying children, it is a requirement to have a compact toilet which can be carried for example in a bag or pocket, and which can be folded, quickly unfolded and taken into use.
There are numerous attempts for designing portable toilets or potties especially for small children.
Several prior art attempts involve a constant size toilet made of hard, self-supported, injection moulded or pressed plastic. It is a fundamental disadvantage of constant-size approaches that the relatively large size allows limited mobility only, therefore restricting availability. Such types of toilets can be transported for example in a car boot, but may not be carried with ease by a child minder on a long-term basis.
For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 2,974,321 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,633,536 toilets are disclosed that can be opened like a small carrying case. These approaches only partly remedy the shortfall described above. The size is still too large for a child minder to carry the toilet with ease.
There are designs that use an assembly consisting of several pieces. Such approaches are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,118,146, U.S. Pat. No. 3,484,875, U.S. Pat. No. 3,600,719, U.S. Pat. No. 4,710,989, U.S. Pat. No. 4,995,122, U.S. Pat. No. 5,448,785, U.S. Pat. No. 5,732,418, U.S. Pat. No. 6,061,845 and JP 02189119. The disadvantages in this case are that setting up from a disassembled condition is overcomplicated and takes a long time, and furthermore that the folding of the toilet to a small size is not possible.
Collapsible toilets assembled from flat-folded sheets are also known. Such approaches are described for example in U.S. Pat. No. 2,849,726, U.S. Pat. No. 2,893,017, U.S. Pat. No. 2,912,702, U.S. Pat. No. 3,097,016, U.S. Pat. No. 3,159,848, U.S. Pat. No. 3,319,263, U.S. Pat. No. 5,187,819, U.S. Pat. No. 5,524,301, U.S. Pat. No. 5,682,623, U.S. Pat. No. 6,047,414, DE 296 07 144 U1, FR 2 638 628, JP 02119828, JP 04114618, JP 11155766, WO 98/29019 and WO 00/59355. The disadvantages of these toilets are that generally the assembly from an unfolded status is overcomplicated and takes a long time, consequently the period of preparing the unit for use is very long. It is also a general disadvantage that the width and height of flat-folded panels are too large for carrying the unit with ease, and the most frequent reason for this is that the seat surface cannot be folded. Designs without a seat surface are disadvantageous due to the discomfort hence caused. A further disadvantage is that an eventual receptacle bag can only be fitted subsequently and with difficulty into these prior art toilets.
A toilet consisting of a sheet material and having a foldable structure is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,040,249. This prior art toilet can be unfolded relatively easily, but it is a disadvantage that in a folded status it is very thick due to the numerous layers of the complicated internal structure. A further basic disadvantage is that the seat surface of the unfolded structure is not well designed, and the user—for example a child—sits on two distant, ergonomically unfit surfaces or on the lateral edges.
A toilet assembled from a sheet material is described furthermore in DE 196 25 980 A1. An advantage of this solution is that the toilet has a seat surface, which is collapsible along a fold-line. It is a disadvantage, however, that due to the separate seat surface, the unfolding and assembly process is relatively complicated and the seat surface is not fixed in a steady way to the side walls of the toilet. The seat surface design does not allow the collapsing of the toilet to a small size necessary for portability and the load-bearing capacity of this design is also questionable.